Reaching an Understanding

John Sabatini is a Senior Research Scientist in the Research & Development Division at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, NJ. His research interests and expertise are in reading literacy development and disabilities, assessment, cognitive psychology, and educational technology. He is the principal investigator of a Department of Education funded grant to develop pre-K -12 comprehension assessments.Tenaha O'Reilly is currently a Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service in Princeton, New Jersey. His research interests include a variety of topics relating to reading comprehension, metacognition, background knowledge and summative assessment.Elizabeth R. Albro, Ph.D, is currently Acting Commissioner of the National Center for Education Research, Institute of Education Sciences, at the U.S. Department of Education. Dr. Albro received her doctorate in Psychology from the University of Chicago, and served on the Child Development and Education faculty at Whittier College, and on the Psychology faculty at Wheaton College, Norton MA. She has spent the past decade overseeing research programs in the areas of reading and writing and cognitive science at the National Center for Education Research.

• Section I: Assessment, Learning, and Instruction: Connecting Text, Task, and Reader/ Learner1. Assessing Multiple Source Comprehension Through Evidence Centered Design Kimberly A. Lawless, Susan R. Goldman, Kimberly Gomez, Flori Manning, and Jason Braasch 2. The Case for Scenario-Based Assessments of Reading CompetencyKathleen M. Sheehan and Tenaha O’Reilly3. Assessing Comprehension Processes During ReadingKeith Millis and Joseph Magliano4. Searching for Supplementary Screening Measures to Identify Children at High Risk for Developing Later Reading ProblemsDonald L. Compton, Amy M. Elleman, and Hugh W. Catts 5. Assessment and Instruction Connections: The Impact of Teachers’ Access and Use of Assessment-to-Instruction SoftwareCarol McDonald Connor, Frederick J. Morrison, Barry Fishman, and Christopher Schatschneider6. Multiple Bases for Comprehension Difficulties: The Potential of Cognitive and Neurobiological Profiling for Validation of Subtypes and Development of AssessmentsLaurie E. Cutting and Hollis S. Scarborough7. NLP Methods for Supporting Vocabulary AnalysisPaul DeaneSection II: How to Build for the Future1. An Explanative Modeling Approach to Measurement of Reading ComprehensionMark Wilson and Stephen Moore2. Cognitive Psychometric Models as a Tool for Reading Assessment Engineering Joanna Gorin and Dubravka Svetina

Reading comprehension research exploded in the 1980s based on advances in cognitive psychology. The field seems on the verge of another set of major advances. The stress on ‘close reading’ in the Common Core Standards forces a careful examination of what we mean by reading for understanding and new ways of looking at comprehension. This volume provides many fine ideas for new ways of understanding comprehension, measuring understanding and beginning to understand how to screen students for reading disabilities in a fashion that takes comprehension into account.